The tide was in at Deadmans Beach, and the wind was up. The fishing fleet was ranged on the banks of shingle being encroached by rushing and receding waves: an impressive if heterogenous collection of chiefly traditionally clinker-built vessels (but some of fibreglass), both larger trawlers and also punts, that’s to say, undecked boats, all with diesel engines, sitting on their greased hardwood blocks or planks, awaiting favourable conditions. Linseed oil dully gleamed and colours faded aga...

Two youths – the one, a hoodie, the other, a beanie – were observed at 10:57 sharing a plastic bottle of cider behind the electricity pylons. White Lightning. They moved hardly at all. The weather was clement, if still chilly. At the road junction for Deadmans Beach just beyond the Barbican Gate was an emptied pub (the Barbican Inn in fact, the faded sign said), half-timbered and lead-latticed, advertised as being for sale, with temporary wire mesh fencing mounted on breeze blocks barring...

The case continues. It is built sentence by
sentence. And so we are sentenced to death. The sea was lucid. The sea was
impossible. How could we proceed? One plus one is two, but one times one is
one. The story so far: still a south-westerly, with gulls wheeling in it. No
further, then. But all these manila folders have re-emerged, bulging with
cases, past and indeed ongoing. There are stacks of them. Filing cabinets
needed, make a note of that. But these cases, closed or still o...